6 Sci-Fi Classics That Influenced Snowpiercer

The best slam-bang spectacle you'll see for a while

The best action film of this summer comes from a South Korean director you probably didn't know existed. Snowpiercer, a breakneck sci-fi adventure about a train carrying the last survivors of a deep-freeze environmental apocalypse, hits theaters this Friday courtesy of Bong Joon-ho, a director making his stateside debut after having made waves — both abroad and at home — with prior gems Memories of Murder, The Host, and Mother. Like his latest, those were all electric genre pieces, about, respectively, a serial-killer investigation, a rampaging aquatic monster, and a murder mystery. Together, they form a body of work that not only makes Bong the equal of his international blockbuster movie peers, but which so seamlessly blends large-scale chaos, intimate human drama, and piercing sociopolitical commentary that it was no surprise, last year, when Quentin Tarantino likened the South Korean auteur to Steven Spielberg.

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That comparison is apt, especially when one takes into consideration the complex and empathetic characterizations found in Bong's stories, as well as their sly, biting humor. Yet Snowpiercer is more than merely a "Spielbergian" future fable. Rather, it's a saga indebted to countless classics of the genre. Though adapted from a 1982 French graphic novel, its real roots can be traced back to many illustrious science-fiction predecessors, mostly other films, though also, in one particular case, a video game. Paying clever homage, the movie calls attention to its inspirations (sometimes self-consciously) while nonetheless combining them into something uniquely novel and thrilling.

12 Monkeys

Snowpiercer operates similarly to Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch, insofar as it provides a stage-by-stage narrative in which each subsequent stop along the way is, on some level, a shout-out. Bong's tale concerns a group of rebels led by Chris Evans's Curtis aboard a speeding train that constantly circles an earth that's been frozen over (à la The Day After Tomorrow) thanks to a chemical agent that was intended to stop global warming. The train is divided between the rear-cabin poor (who are treated like cattle by armed guards) and the front-cabin rich, all of whom are under the command of the train's creator and godhead figure, Wilford. With Curtis's dirty and disadvantaged brethren dressed in worn rags and living in quarters that resemble a cluttered, bunk-bed-infested subterranean pigsty, Snowpiercer's early scenes are inspired by the rathole style of Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, another film about mankind transforming earth into a wintry post-apocalyptic wasteland via scientific folly.

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Brazil

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Bong's debt to Gilliam also extends to his fondness for images of fantastically grotesque aristocrats in drab futuristic settings, the most stark of which comes via Tilda Swinton's Mason, a ruthless tyrant with awful dentures and a mink stole around her neck. She appears to have been transported from Gilliam's Brazil, not only because of her look but because of her dogged promotion of a social hierarchy in which "everyone has their place," a mantra intended to keep Curtis and his ragamuffin lot from striving to be more than filthy proletariat.

Alien

Mason's ethos forms the crux of Snowpiercer's conflict between the haves and have-nots, which Curtis deems necessary in order to secure justice for those under the thumb of the cruel Wilford. His revolt involves traveling from the rear to the front of the train, a car-by-car progression that not only gives the material a distinctly video-game-y structure, but involves passage through gates and corridors that recall the walkways of Alien and its legion of imitators.

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Oldboy

As Curtis and company — including Jamie Bell's sidekick and Bong regular Song Kang-ho's systems expert, who agrees to open each car's doors in exchange for a toxic-waste narcotic called Kronol — advance, Snowpiercer delivers a series of set pieces that rival any of this summer's slam-bang spectacles. After discovering that their gelatinous food bars are actually created from creepy-crawly insectoids (shades of Soylent Green), the film delivers its finest skirmish, as the rebels are confronted by a horde of hooded, axe-wielding maniacs. During one prolonged, side-scrolling pan that follows Curtis through this chaotic battle, Bong employs slow-motion to fixate on his hero hacking and slashing his way forward. It's a panorama of one-against-many violence that takes its cue from the now-legendary hammer scene in fellow South Korean director Park Chan-wook's 2003 Oldboy.

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Blade Runner

Even as it proves itself a distinctive beast, as when the hooded villains preface their attack by slicing open a dead fish, Snowpiercer gains much of its power from its synthesis of various allusions. That process continues when Curtis and his remaining comrades combat more enemies in a steam room whose slanted-door architecture and hazy-bright colors more than slightly evoke the changing room of snake-loving replicant stripper Zhora from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.

BioShock

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That Terry Gilliam and Ridley Scott should prove to be the biggest influences on Bong's visuals and production design is no surprise. Few directors have had such a monumental impact on modern sci-fi imagery. Yet ultimately, Gilliam and Scott are less fundamental to Snowpiercer's make-up than a more interactive ancestor: Irrational Games' BioShock franchise. That's evident in BioShock's and Wilford's signature logos, and especially during Bong's magnificent centerpiece set in the train's school compartment. The classroom's sunshiny colors and childish decorations clash with the rest of the train's dour grayness. And in it, a gleeful-to-the-point-of-demented teacher (Alison Pill, in a delightful counterbalance to her put-upon role on The Newsroom) repeatedly engages her students in call-and-response chants that reinforce the cult of personality surrounding Wilford, whose backstory is retold through a video marked by a neo-Art Deco style also echoing BioShock.

The game's real legacy in Snowpiercer, however, comes via Wilford himself, a revered idol (akin to BioShock's Andrew Ryan) who eventually delivers bombshell revelations about Curtis that speak to the nature of free will, revolutions, and identity. While also suggesting Neo's meeting with the Architect in The Matrix Revolutions and, in the engine room's layout, the circular-spinning designs of 2001, this final encounter between Curtis and Wilford addresses many of BioShock's core issues regarding the tension between autonomy and subjugation, insurgency and collaboration, and the ways in which all narratives, be they historical or cinematic, are guided by powerful authors. It's a heady philosophical climax to a film with a deft balance of action and allegory that is itself, ultimately, the byproduct of its own creator's greatness.